Do you remember the Internet coffee pot? Back in the earliest days of the Internet, researchers at the University of Cambridge put a constantly-updating image of their break-room coffee pot on the Internet. It had a utilitarian purpose – why go to the break room if the pot was empty? But it was also a bit of an Internet sensation. I still remember showing friends the coffee pot on the Mosaic browser and breathlessly exclaiming, “And this is all the way from England, and it’s live…”. There really wasn’t a lot of content on the Internet in those days.

Compare then to this: a coffee maker that tracks your usage, and wirelessly “phones home” to order refills when you’re close to using up all of your coffee pods. If you think this is unusual, then you better strap yourself in, because from here on, things will get faster. The next phase of the Internet is arriving sooner than you think with the Internet of Everything.

The US Federal Government, like many large IT organizations and other national governments recognizes the important of transition their networks to support IPv6. On Sept 2010 a memo on the transition to IPv6, was issued by then Federal CIO; Vivek Kundra, outlining the government’s commitment and rational behind expediting the operational deployment and use of IPv6.

Once again, just in case you missed it, the world is really running out of IPv4 Addresses. This time it is for real and if you are not a believer yet, you can investigate and find the second of the worlds five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs) is about to run out of IPv4 addresses. News of this historic event broke last week through an Internet Society guest blog post by Axel Pawlik, Managing Director of RIPE. The blog announced we clearly have turned another page in the IPv4 history books as the Réseaux IP Européens Network Coordination Centre (RIPE NCC) has begun allocating their last IPv4 /8 blocks. If you are not familiar with RIPE NCC they are the independent, not-for-profit membership organization that supports the infrastructure of the Internet in Europe. The most prominent activity of the RIPE NCC is to act as the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) providing global Internet resources and related services (IPv4, IPv6 and AS Number resources) to members in the RIPE NCC service region.

What does this really mean? How many addresses are left to allocate? If you’re Read More »

Twice a year, I get to experience a peculiar mix of stress and satisfaction that comes from participating in the design and operations of internal networks for the (US and European) CiscoLive – networks these events depend upon.

My role is vital to the efficiency of the whole system, but certainly not glamorous. If I were to compare the CiscoLive network with a dental office, I’d be the technician that only fixes the upper-right tooth – and ensures you continue to breathe well. More specifically, I’d be working on “the number 6 molar” – because I deal with the client-facing setup of IPv6, and the monitoring of all the related dependencies and results.

First a bit of disclosure. I have worked for Cisco over 15 years, much of that time as the lead developer for EIGRP. I think I understand its strengths and weakness’ very well, and have spent a great deal of energy minimizing them.

I often find comparing protocols similar to the old “tab vs spaces” or “emacs vs vi” wars. There are valid reasons to choose one over the other and in the grand scheme of things it comes down to a wash; often preference or ‘religion’. EIGRP seems to victim to this . I mean where are the “ISIS vs OSPF” debates? With EIGRP, network engineers that love it – love it. Those that don’t, well they don’t. Arguing its merits often results in an equally long list of “yea but” demerits.

For example, most everyone would agree eigrp is “simple to deploy”, but detractors would argue that simplicity leads to sloppy designs and only though complexity can we force network engineers to “do their job” and design the network properly. Read More »

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